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Here is a sample poem from
Rehearsing the Miracle
LOVE NIGHT
for Al Purdy
At the border between life and death,
where the quick and the dead
watch each other through barbed wire,
an old poet takes dictation from the fierce
infant, sucking its thumb, in his chest.
This is the evening none of us can sleep.
In China, where children are rationed,
they are calling it Love Night,
and, all over the world, men and women
lie in the dark listening for the same
cobblers, who stitch up the sick
and the wounded victims of bombs
that fall in showers of stars, to begin
sewing the baby shoes that will drop
when the clock strikes twelve
at the new millennium.
At dawn, the poet will peel a green
banana and type the words he is hearing.
He has so little time to leave us
his last book, a story minutes older than war,
when the first man and woman were alone
for a moment in a world before clocks.
It has always been Love Night for him,
riding his bride of fifty years into the blue
ocean that brings us the first
cries of children born in the tents of war.
Six degrees of separation and we have evolved
to this, a display of fireworks, men and women
lying on their backs looking at the damaged
sky for a sign, the old poet beside his wife
in the middle of a forest full of men in combat
boots, wondering why the angel of death
also brings children, wondering whether one
act of grace - a poem about husbands and wives
making bridges over dangerous rivers -
is the only country without borders.
Copyright Linda Rogers
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